1. cannabis tech: Getting Your Cannabis Grow Off To A Great Start
There’s nothing a cannabis cultivator enjoys more than harvesting the dense, fragrant buds at the end of a successful grow.
However, getting there takes a touch of finesse, as well as an understanding of basic plant biology.
Getting the early parts of the growing process right is essential to reaping a dream yield.
Today’s automated grow systems can help dramatically simplify indoor growing and reduce labor costs, but cultivators still need to keep a close eye on their plants and make adjustments and decisions throughout the early stages.
Moreover, this requires an understanding of the cannabis birds and bees.
Factors In Flowering
Flowering is the cannabis plant’s way to produce offspring, which is its primary goal.
Cannabis wants to produce flowers so when winter comes; it will leave seeds behind which can germinate the following spring and keep the life cycle going. In the natural plant cycle, seeds germinate in spring, grow all summer, then flower in fall in one-year periods.
In cultivation, we aim to change this up dramatically. We don’t want seeds to form during flowering, and we certainly don’t want cycles to take a year.
In the simple linear case, the cannabis cycle can take 12-14 weeks (seed germination, veg growth, blooming).
By using mother plants, taking cuttings to be grown into clones, the cycle is shortened to 12 weeks (cuttings, clones two weeks, veg growth two weeks, bloom eight weeks).
Well-cultivated cannabis in large production shops can bring the cycle down to 8 weeks to become a ready to use CBD hemp flower bud.
Moreover, seeds are not even part of the process! Mother plants, cuttings, cloning, and veg growth, all happen in parallel to blooming in separate rooms and on separate light cycles.
To have this fast turnaround of seedless cannabis, we need to understand the plant is dioecious, meaning there are separate female flowers and male flowers on different plants.
Differing from most annuals, like tomato plants, where the male and female flower parts are on the same plants.
Because they are dioecious, it’s easy to control pollination in cannabis plants and keep seeds at bay.
As long as the female plant doesn’t become pollinated, it won’t form seeds.
Instead, it puts its energies into building more flowers in hopes of becoming pollinated.
On the flip side, if a female plant does become pollinated, it focuses on growing seeds rather than flowers.
Of course, if you’re growing from seed, you don’t initially know if your plants are male or female, so once flowering starts you have to kill the males to prevent pollination.
And it’s important to know, if you’re not careful, or just plain unlucky, your female plant can form male flowers, leading to unwanted pollination.
Stressing a plant can cause this, as can bad plant genetics.
Now that we’ve covered the ins and outs of cannabis reproduction let’s look at some of the critical variables you can control to help ensure you get excellent, consistent yields.
We’ll start from the premise that you have healthy plants; plants which started sick and weak will never be able to match the potential of plants with a healthier start.
LIGHTING
Cannabis is a photoperiodic plant, which means it’s easy to control its flowering.
Indoors, we simulate long summer days for mother, clone, and veg plants with a schedule of 18 hours ON, with short nights at 6 hours OFF.
When the summer ends, and we move into the short days of fall, we change the light cycle to 12 hours ON and 12 hours OFF.
This tricks the plants into the hurry up and bloom cycle.
The best way for a cultivator to determine the harvest date is by controlling the day they begin flowering.
Equally, if not more, important than lighting is darkness.
Uninterrupted darkness is the key to flowering in cannabis.
If you don’t allow a long dark period, your plants will continue its indeterminate growth as its cells keep dividing.
Interrupting the darkness—even for a couple of minutes—will cause hormonal changes in the plant which can result in the growth of male flowers, leading to unwanted pollination, which translates to seeds.
If a cultivator needs to do maintenance, best to do it during the light hours.
Light intensity is vital as well.
As the rate of growth increases, you want to boost light to feed the rapid pace of growth. High light intensity is crucial for promoting bud density.
Of course, you want to make sure you don’t turn up the lights so high they begin to damage your plants.
You have options when selecting lights—HPS or LED. HPS lights or a less expensive investment upfront but may end up costing more in the long run.
You can run your numbers through AEssenseGrows’ online cost calculator to determine the best choice for your operations.
NUTRIENT CONCENTRATION
We like to standardize on General Hydroponics’ nutrients for plants.
As you’ll see, nutrient dosing gets a bit complex, so this is where a consistent supplier and fertigation automation can help out.
As flowering starts, the rate of growth increases rapidly.
To fuel this, you’ll want to improve your nutrient concentration and feed high levels of nitrogen—which forms amino acids and proteins–during the first few weeks of flowering.
Around the middle of the flowering period, cell elongation becomes dominant over division, now is the time to taper off the nitrogen and increase potassium, which helps plants absorb more water to elongate cells, like a water balloon, enabling the buds to swell.
We like to automate this scheduled nutrient transition through our Guardian Grow Manager recipes.
HUMIDITYAs plants begin to increase their rate of growth, you’ll want to lower humidity slowly to encourage transpiration, which allows more water to flow through the plant.
As the plant consumes more water, the elongated cells fill and bring nutrients up to the growing parts of the plant.
Humidity should start high as you convert cuttings to clones (~80%) and transition down to 60-65 percent at the end of the vegetative growth phase.
In flowering, we transition down to 50 percent by the fourth week of flowering and down to 40% or so by the end of the flowering cycle.
The reduction in humidity helps prevent fungal infection along the way.
CARBON DIOXIDE
Delivering plenty of carbon dioxide to your plants is essential for healthy plant growth.
Plants take carbon from the air and use it to build cells and body structure.
As more cells are created, supplementary CO2 will allow your plants to proliferate and develop dense buds.
Supplementing CO2 also helps carbon fixation become more efficient, reducing the unwanted photorespiration which grows dominant with the higher temperatures you will want to fuel photosynthesis.
So the increased carbon dioxide needs to go hand in hand with increased light intensity because, without the corresponding increase in light energy, the plants will not be able to use the additional carbon dioxide.
A good general rule of thumb is to increase your CO2 level always to be higher than the PPF output of your light intensity.
For example, a thousand watt light requires 1000-1400 PPM CO2 density for effective photosynthesis utilization.
AIR TEMPERATURE
Increasing air temperature will increase the rate of photosynthesis to a point. However, above 85 degrees, plants go into photorespiration.
Moreover, if you don’t match the higher air temperatures with higher levels of carbon dioxide and light intensity, your plants will be doing more photorespiration than photosynthesis, which will take an enormous toll on your plants’ health.
At a certain point, enzymes won’t perform their functions and will fall apart, and your plants won’t establish a healthy metabolism.
There’s a balance you’ll need to find for your particular strain.
In some cases, cultivator preference plays a role, with grow temperatures impacting such things as the taste of your cannabis or the terpene profiles.
PLANT HEIGHT
Cultivators should plan to determine plant size, realizing the plants will double to triple in size during flowering, mostly during the first four weeks.
Once flowering starts, you can trim or bend the branches and use a trellis to control your grow.
By trellising the heavy buds in the latter stages of flowering, you can prevent energy from being diverted to growing new stems to support the plant rather than its target—building stronger flowers.
Pruning is another important step.
Pruning and sculpting a plant helps ensure the entire plant gets maximum airflow and consistent, equal light distribution.
The weaker undergrowth should be removed as it draws energy from the healthier parts of the plant and is more susceptible to pests and pathogens.
Pruning and trellising practices vary by strain, and you’ll learn best over time through trial and error.
AUTOMATION
Automation can play a huge role in making precision indoor growing manageable.
The AEssenseGrows’ Guardian Grow Manager central management system, for instance, enables growers to program their growing environment so the changes in nutrients fed the plants will occur automatically; growers can monitor and override the settings from their smartphones or laptops.
While automation helps, there is no replacement for a cultivator’s basic understanding of cannabis plant science and a unique sense of your plant’s health and well-being.
Every cultivator will build this experience as they go through a few lifecycles to determine what adjustments to make for their specific strain and growing environment.
AEssenseGrows is happy to help and answer questions on best practices as you go.
Written by Kark Kulick, plant scientist
2. Cannabis Cheri: How did marijuana become illegal?
With so much credible scientific evidence about the wonders of medical marijuana, it’s a fair question.
The answer will shock you.
So this Halloween (or whenever you happen to be reading), follow us through the tales of reefer madness in our nation’s history and discover the horrifying truth of how marijuana became and continues to be federally illegal.
In the 1920s most Americans had no idea that the cannabis sold at their local corner drugstore was the demon weed “marijuana” that early prohibitionists like our first “drug czar” Henry Anslinger labeled as the “most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.”
Rising from the ashes of the Bureau of Prohibition, Anslinger was determined to make his Bureau of Narcotics a powerhouse police agency of munificent proportions.
Newspapers and movie newsreels gave headline treatment to his frightening tales that “Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its user’s insanity, criminality, and death” and that “You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother.”
Cannabis Heroes: Fiorello LaGuardia Tries to Stop the Reefer Madness
Openly skeptical of Anslinger’s claims, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, commissioned a study in 1939 on “The Marijuana Problem in the City of New York.”
Known as the LaGuardia report, the study, which was undertaken by the New York Academy of Medicine and published in 1944, found that smoking marijuana did not lead to addiction or the use of harder drugs, did not cause violent, anti-social behavior or uncontrolled sexual urges and that “The publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marijuana smoking in New York City is unfounded.”
The report was given little notice in the media. Anslinger’s lies about marijuana continued to flourish even after his retirement in 1962 evidenced by the Outstanding Record Citation bestowed on him by President John Kennedy.
How Does Marijuana Remain Illegal: From Fake News to Faulty Science
Although the government no longer peddles Anslinger’s murder, mayhem and insanity tales as the boogey-man of marijuana, it now peddles fake and faulty science.
The most often sited scary health story that even some respectable medical researchers accept is that since smoking marijuana produces similar carcinogens as when tobacco is smoked, smoking marijuana causes lung cancer.
Believing the connection to be there and looking forward to the publication of the definitive scholarly paper connecting marijuana to lung cancer, the National Institute for Drug Abuse provided Dr. Donald Tashkin, a renowned pulmonologist and researcher at the UCLA School of Medicine, with so much money that he undertook one of the largest population-based studies ever conducted on the relationship of marijuana to lung cancer.
Not only did his research not find any connection between smoking marijuana and lung cancer, his paper was one of the first to present evidence that marijuana reduces the incidence of cancer.
One of the groups in the study showed that the people who smoke marijuana had a lower incidence of lung cancer than people who did not smoke anything at all.
3. Forbes: How Tech Will Drive The Next Stage Of Cannabis Regulation
Markets cover the legal cannabis industry.
Medical-marijuana items are displayed at Palliative Health Center dispensary in San Jose, California, U.S., on Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013.
San Jose is the medical-marijuana capital of Silicon Valley with 106 clinics, about twice as many per square mile as Los Angeles.
The playing field in the cannabis industry has shifted drastically in the last two decades.
California started the legalization trend among the states through allowing medical marijuana in 1996.
In 2012, Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational usage.
Today, about 30 states have legalized cannabis in some form, with more states soon to follow.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Yet, the rules that govern the industry’s development – the very structures that control and guide cultivation, sale and compliance – are still in a nascent stage.
They differ from state to state, and a running theme is that states and local governments are experimenting and largely developing their regulations through trial and error.
Through this process, tech companies have been key allies in helping both the public and private sectors cope with managing the data needed for collection and transmission, overcome inefficiencies, and help with compliance.
In February, two of the leading authorities on cannabis regulation and policy (Lewis Koski and John Hudak) published a white paperillustrating the early stages of legal cannabis history and its challenges, which they call “Cannabis 1.0”.
Specifically, Koski and Hudak describe this phase as government-centric, skeptical, and conservative, and their report predicted the eventual rise of a “Cannabis 2.0” stage that will be marked by a tech-driven, more agile industry that is increasingly comfortable with the risks inherent in the sector.
They wrote that this comfort will be fostered by years spent responding to rapidly changing and uncertain policy environments, all while satisfying the demands of regulators, business owners, and consumers. (Full disclosure: This white paper was commissioned by Green Bits, the company I co-founded and where I serve as CEO).
Today, we find ourselves somewhere between Cannabis 1.0 and 2.0.
One sign of being on the road to Cannabis 2.0 is the fact that more established players – from financial institutions to payment processors to venture capital firms – are starting to take more than just a hard look at entering the space. This has not been the norm, largely because marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, which has historically deterred large banking, technology and other firms from entering the market.
In many ways, this gray area has been a perfect environment for the kind of forward-thinking innovations that the tech industry is known for – a major problem needed solving and the risk-averse establishment chose to sit it out.
It was left to smaller, scrappier firms to take on the substantial risk to advance the industry and try to make it safe and responsive to public expectations.
Today, the companies that were involved in launching and troubleshooting Cannabis 1.0 are providing seed-to-sale tracking software, genetic testing and modification capabilities, financial accounting, point-of-sale processing, inventory transportation, extraction equipment, and more – all of the hallmarks of a flourishing cannabis industry.
Article written by Ben Curren